When preparing a stencil for use in a printing process in a solder stencil printing machine, it is typically necessary to take into account various characteristics of the stencil for the purposes of calibration and quality control of the printing process. Currently, such preparation can take, for example, up to 30 minutes each time a stencil is used and it would be of great advantage to have some means of determining the specific characteristics of a particular stencil in a readily accessible manner to enable such to be quickly read and implemented. Electronic tagging devices for other purposes are known per se and are capable of storing reasonable amounts of data which can be read out utilizing a touch reader or a remote interrogation device, for example a radio frequency (RF) transmitter/receiver, the tag acting as a transponder capable of retransmitting the data contained within the tag when appropriately interrogated by an interrogator/tag reader.